Actually this can be in some cases perfectly valid argument. Especially if the person saying this explored the topic and the “something” in question being rare event in best circumstances (peasant/blacksmith being knighted) and as well something newsworthy (woman knighted for battlefield valor - I have difficulties to imagine no one recording this). The woman would be a piece of legends. Blacksmith can go unnoticed.
I would like female character, but fully understand that if they want to integrate the story into historical settings and use the fact that this period is relatively undocumented that it is “safer” and more realistic to use male protagonist. Not because female couldn’t do something similar at all, but because female couldn’t do something similar and remain undocumented.
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Your argument is more reasonable, but still fallacious because as already posted above, things of that nature did not go undocumented. The precedence is there, but if the game is to be played with 100% historical accuracy then the developers would esssentially be basing the plot off history books, and adding in their own embellishments to provide flavor to NPC/player interactions. Since it is a game, it will not be 100% historically accurate. Maybe around 50-60%. The accuracy lying in combat, setting, and technology, and the remaining 40-50% being in the storytelling.
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I study medieval archaeology with a main interest in the military side of things. Iam also a strong supporter of females in the military today. So females that fight is a topic i do have an interest in.
Iam in no way an expert on this, but I have read a text or two about this. And I would love it if somebody could find a text that tell about a female that is taught fighting during her upbringing.(from catholic europe and from about this period)
My point it It is not that hard to find cases of Female Nobles who was leaders of factions in a war. I also know of cases of female nobles actually leading their troops.
But I don’t know of any where a lowborn female learns to fight during her upbringing and then becomes a successful soldier. And if this happened just like lowborn males sometimes was knighted, then surely we would see it mentioned in the sources…
So if you think this happened, then please provide a source.
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I feel that you are arguing about something else than I am.
What I understood about the time period @warhorse chose is that due to civil war there is not many documents writing about this time period. That makes the historical fiction easier. Blacksmith having adventures being involved in the war being knighted is not important enough to be recorded and therefore his story can be considered accurate even if we don’t have any documents about it.
For female I am not saying (and no one here I hopeis) such story is completely impossible. But there are no records of anything like that and this period is not undocumented enough for something like this to pass any notice. As you said it was documented, but in different periods and places (and as @ThomasAagaard said not for commoners)
Story of realism I believe warhorse is shooting for could not be about fighting with female protagonist. The story must thread the thin line of not important and unique enough to end in history books, but important enough to keep our interest.
Were the story set cca 20 years later and you were some fighter in Hussite camps, I would say that there is more of a chance of encountering fighting women. There are documents and legends of some unconventional tactics employed by Hussite women in battles.
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I agree completely, but maybe we are all overestimating how big of a role the female would be playing to warrant an interesting story, and underestimating the capabilities of @warhorse to design one.
I think that there is a possibility for a female to play maybe not a key figure in the broad sweeping view of history, but in the details. Maybe you are not the commander leading the charge into battle or up the ladders to a castle, but one of the commanders’ key consultants, or a trusted family member with a slightly odd backstory. She fights alongside, or near him, in battle, and has small, potentially unnoticeable, but meaningful impacts on the outcome of the battle which would go unnoticed in the history books?
As the kickstarter states, there is more than one role to play, even as a male. Not only as a warrior, but as a bard, or thief/assassin. Would a woman not be potentially as well suited, or maybe even more apt (using a woman’s guile) in those alternate roles.
Yes, fine, I can understand some people’s reluctance to not having a woman in a combat position (even though with some clever storytelling and inventiveness I could see it happening as I said above). But bringing in the other options (which might change for a female character, who knows) such as a thief/assassin or a bard, I don’t believe that it is possible to rule out a role for women that would be entertaining in it’s playstyle, while still remaining acceptably historically accurate.
We cannot replace the central male character with female model and voice, change a few NPC reactions, and call it a day. Well, we could but it is against our design philosophy and we don’t want to compromise our vision. And designing the game twice (or more times for any other character variation) is out of our possibilities no matter how awesome it would be. Thus we tailored the story around a very specific male character.
There will be part of the game where you can play as a separate female character (switch role).
Also please read the FAQ regarding sandbox aspect of our game.
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Please never give up on your ideals and vision.
Fed up with people doing that because a minority throw up a fuss and force change over the majority, it happens all the time in politics.
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Thanks for the reply. I respect your design choices and your vision and I apologize for misunderstanding the situation. I though it was still open for suggestions. It just makes me sad that the visions of so many cool games exclude my desiderata by default. Since you of course can’t change the whole project and feel minor changes wouldn’t be enough to satisfactorily implement a female character storyline, there’s just the option to hope for mods 
I’m aware of the female sidekick chapter. I first thought that “playable female character” meant a protagonist, thus the chapter is in a way the reason for my big disappointment when I figured out that it was just a sidekick.
But a last wish: The next time warhorse develops a vision for an awesome game (that seems to be the type of game I was looking for for a long time) please try to make “playable female protagonist” part of this initial vision. I and many others would appreciate it very much.
Maybe you should consider that this is no “minority”. And that making suggestions or wishes regarding a game in development is no “forced change”. In case of this thread here the people actually rather plea and beg. Because they want it to be the game they dreamed of so bad. It is quite disturbing to read that this angers you so much.
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I understand your desires. I am also saddened by the industry standard which is unnecessarily applied in like 90% of cases. Or that developers have to fight hard for their vision when that vision happens to be a female protagonist. That’s just not healthy. I believe our game is not the case. It is a logical choice design-wise. A woman going through the twists and historical events we want to depict is highly improbable and would not feel natural if we want to be authentic. There were very few female warriors in middle ages and to lessen their numbers even more I have to point out that most of them were nobles. Our character is not a noble. If we ever do Joan of Arc RPG however it would be different and you certainly wouldn’t be able play as a male.
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I won’t flash my credentials in history, as I think facts speak for themselves. But while we’re at it, I have also read several books and other sources on the subject, and this discussion has inspired me to read even more about it as you have surely gathered if you have read the thread, so it has been nice in that way.
I want to start with questioning the relevance of learning fighting during your upbringing in this discussion. I think it’s safe to say most men of the era did not receive such training either if they were not part of a soldier family or the nobility, and during the renaissance maybe a rich burgher family.
But anyway, for fun, allow me to make a quick case for the possibility of a medieval peasant woman receiving basic combat training in Catholic Europe, in roughly the relevant time period; there is a manuscript from around the turn of the 14th century, know as Royal Armouries Ms. I.33. This is the earliest surviving combat manual, and it is interesting on several levels. Scholars believe it is a fighting manual for people of non-warrior classes, id est peasants and clergymen, written by a secular priest perhaps teaching fencing as a form of self-defence, or maybe some kind of fencing sport, or maybe both, to the peasantry. The illustrations in the manuscript are of a priest and a pupil using a sword and a buckler, showing the techniques described. The interesting thing for this case of mine, though, is that on the last two pages, the pupil is replaced by a woman.
Why was this? Maybe the monk drawing it had a favourite female saint, Walpurga, who he really wanted to depict fighting. That is possible. Or maybe the monk or monks teaching these techniques saw the need for women to also defend themselves, and taught fencing to women as well on occasion. Or maybe both. Or perhaps neither. In any case, the thought of a woman fencing was obviously not so offensive to the monks that they wouldn’t put it down in their writings. I am not pushing this as an absolute fact, but it does show that it is not so incredible to think that the main character of a game could have some combat training to start with, if need be.
For a peasant woman both receiving training and becoming a successful soldier? You’re gonna have to give me some time for that! 
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I believe in some retrospecs female characters could work but you wouldn’t be a knight or a soldier in anyway.
A minority is a section less than half, so im quite sure its a minority
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Let me give you a very good example how it could work if we decided to have lead female character - Brienne of Tarth. I love her character in the Game of Thrones. Its beautifully written and I believe, that it perfectly illustrates the situation of a women in medieval world. I would say, that the reactions to her in the GOT are very similar to most probable reactions in real medieval world.Anyone who read/saw GOT knows how complicated it is for her to be equal to men. Its great story, but its very personal. Anytime she wants to do something which would be quite easy for a man, she has to struggle. So if we decided to have a woman as a heroine, I would definitelly do it in similar way, but it would not be a story about politics, personal revenge, war. It would be much more personal story and we wanted to tell something else this time.
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Since Joan of Arc was mentioned here - just a quick note. She considered the Hussites to be heretics and sent them a letter in the sense that she would set up a crusade to crush them once the business with England was over.
To be exact: http://archive.joan-of-arc.org/joanofarc_letter_march_23_1430.html here is the letter.
I agree the I.33 depiction is very interesting. But as you said, it is not know exactly why this is the case.
Female nobles leading armies is something we do have sources on.
So any females fighting on a battlefield. any female getting training, any female being a successful soldier.
And we are talking in the medieval period in Europe.
(From the later periods I do Know that one of the Swedish queens was thought everything a boy would. including fencing. and offcause if we go to other parts of the world we again find females fighting)
But offcause one case will not change the bigger picture.
So lets try to change the topic a bit.
So do we have cases where females fighting would be common?
Women picking up a “tool” or weapon to defend herself?
Women helping defend a city or castle during a siege?
Some of the female nobles must have bin able to ride just as well as their men-at-arms.
(like Joanna of Flanders who lead troops from the front at least in one case)
And It would (by our modern logic) be logical for them to get some sort of training in the use of weapons.
Talhoffer have illustrations of a female fighting a male in a Judicial “duel”
(jump to about 6minuttes in)
The big question is, to what extend was this sort of “duel” actually used to solve judicial cases?
Yep, exactly my point from the very beginning of this thread. It would require two different games to have male and also female lead characters.
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No. It was good old patriarchal time
Ah, europeans with their tolerance
I totally agree with warhorse, a lead female character is just too difficult to implement since in these times women did not engage in wars or similar actions, i hope however that there will be interresting female characters in the game!!
I also hope we soon get closer infos on what the playable female side character will be like and at what time in the main plot she will appear!!
Besides the historical facts i think that most players are male and would not like to have a female character just for immersive-gameplay reasons, am i right guys?!
…For what it’s worth, the Cathars (and Waldensians, a similar lay movement) were not close to the game setting, both in terms of chronology and geography. The Waldensians were largely based in the Alps of France and Germany, while the Cathars were located in southern France and northern Italy. Both were declared heresies by the mid-12th century, and both largely exterminated by the mid-13th, although the Waldensians were partly re-absorbed into the Catholic church, and partly survived in isolation. As lay movements, both generally shied away from ideas of ‘clergy’. In contrast, Jan Hus was a priest, and the Bohemian church reform movement was not a lay piety movement like the Cathars or Waldensians.
So, while I appreciate the recognition of the role of strong women in the Medieval period, there are several dangers: First, forgetting that the Middle Ages were a long period, lasting over 1000 years by a rough estimation (fall of Rome to discovery of the new world being one) and as such, an event in one time and place might not mean much in another. Second, using counter-cultural movements to claim norms of behaviour is flawed, as they demonstrate counter-cultural and societal behaviour.
TL;DR: Bringing up the Cathars is like bringing up Napoleon when discussing the war in Afghanistan. Interesting, perhaps, but absolutely no relevance, in time-frame or geography.
The Peasants’ Revolt is a better source for the argument. Froissart’s Chronicles and various literary sources from the time period (i.e. +/- 50 years) would also support your argument better than the Cathars. Incidentally, if you’re interested in women of power, look up the women of Merovingian and Carolingian France and Ottonian Germany. Damn scary ladies.